by Josh Levin
Constance had brought all this on herself, alerting the police to a kidnapping she’d committed. The FBI’s memorandum on the incident, which called her “a habitual missing persons-kidnapping complainant,” was at least the seventh such document the bureau had generated in an eighteen-month span. It was the first of these reports, though, to declare her an out-and-out fraudster—to say she’d lied in court about being Lawrence Wakefield’s daughter and was almost certainly lying again. The FBI’s previous memos had all referred to her as Constance Wakefield and nothing else. This one spelled out all the aliases that had come to light during the Wakefield case: She was Martha Louise White, a.k.a. Martha Lee Davis, Martha Lee Gordon, Constance Harbaugh, Connie Johnson, Connie Maxey, Connie Reed, Constance Singleton, Constance Steinberg, Constance Stienberg, Constance Beverly Stineberg, Constance B. Wakefield, Constance Womack, and Mrs. Willie Womack.
The FBI knew who she’d been and what she’d done. But she wouldn’t pay any price for bringing the cops to her door. All the charges leveled against her in 1967—endangering the life and health of a child, contributing to the dependency of a minor, unauthorized use of a weapon, kidnapping a minor under the age of thirteen—would go away. It’s unclear why she was never prosecuted for any of these alleged acts. Her Chicago Police Department rap sheet doesn’t offer any clues, and the relevant court files haven’t been preserved.
There was no pressure on the Cook County state’s attorney’s office to go after Constance Womack. The Tribune, which had chronicled Constance Wakefield’s moneygrubbing exploits and would publicize Linda Taylor’s welfare thievery, didn’t print any contemporaneous stories about Ana Maria’s kidnapping. But as Taylor was awaiting trial for welfare fraud in March 1975, George Bliss and his colleague William Griffin would talk to the police official who’d interviewed Constance Womack eight years earlier regarding “the disappearance of her [infant].” That investigator would tell the Tribune that he’d compiled evidence that she’d been involved in “baby buying…but that it never was used for criminal prosecution.” Bliss and Griffin would also report that Taylor had been a suspect in another kidnapping—one of the most infamous child abductions in the history of Chicago.
* * *
On the afternoon of April 27, 1964, a woman dressed in a white uniform came into Dora Fronczak’s room in the maternity ward at Michael Reese Hospital. The woman in white stood behind the new mother, watching over her shoulder as she fed her newborn son, Paul Joseph. “Okay, that’s all,” the woman said. “I have to take the baby down to see the doctor.”
Fronczak did as she was told, handing over her day-old infant. When a caregiver came to check on Paul Joseph a few minutes later, the boy’s mother explained that she’d “just given the baby to another nurse.”
At around that time, a hospital staffer saw a woman in a white uniform walking down a corridor. The woman, who was carrying a baby wrapped in a blanket, passed through a doorway leading to a rear stairwell. As soon as that door closed, the woman in white vanished. So did Paul Joseph Fronczak.
The Fronczak kidnapping scandalized Chicago and the nation. On April 28, the day after the abduction, scores of newspapers published page one stories on the woman dressed as a nurse who’d taken a baby boy from his mother’s arms. As many as two hundred police officers and FBI agents were tasked with solving the case. That massive law enforcement contingent interviewed an estimated thirty-eight thousand Chicagoans, a group whose collective knowledge of the caper added up to not much at all. Each new lead turned out to be a false alarm, and every person of interest was quickly cleared of wrongdoing.
After a couple of weeks, the police began to turn their attention elsewhere. The papers moved on, too, checking in with Dora Fronczak only to mark the passage of a series of grim anniversaries. “Our whole life, our plans for the future, still are on the baby,” she said in July 1964, three months after the kidnapping. “It’s something they say time heals, but so far it hasn’t,” she said in October, six months after she’d last seen her child. “I believe that God will return Paul some day,” she said on her son’s first birthday, in April 1965.
That July, a blond-haired, blue-eyed toddler was found abandoned in a stroller outside a New Jersey department store. Given 1960s-era scientific know-how, it was impossible to determine the child’s parentage with certainty. Nevertheless, Dora Fronczak and her husband, Chester, decided he must be their missing son. The couple adopted the boy in December 1966, giving him the name Paul Joseph Fronczak.
The woman in white, meanwhile, remained at large. But eleven years after the kidnapping, the Tribune’s Bliss and Griffin reported that the Fronczak case had been reopened. The leading suspect, they said, was Linda Taylor.
* * *
The evidence against Taylor, Bliss and Griffin wrote on March 21, 1975, included an allegation from one of her ex-husbands, who’d “told [FBI] agents that Miss Taylor appeared one day in the mid-1960s with a newborn baby, altho she had not been pregnant.” Taylor’s explanation for this surprise new addition, according to the paper: that “she hadn’t realized she was pregnant until she gave birth that morning.” The Tribune also said that a woman calling herself Connie Reed—a name Taylor had used in the 1940s—had been at the hospital at the time of Paul Joseph’s abduction. Finally, Bliss and Griffin noted that the Chicago police had received a tip in May 1964, a week after the Fronczak heist, that a person who could’ve been the kidnapper had tried to rent an apartment under the name Constance Wakefield.
Two months after the Tribune posited that the notorious welfare queen might be connected to the notorious Fronczak kidnapping, Taylor told the Chicago Daily News that she’d figured out where this allegation was coming from. She believed her ex-husband Willie Walker—the South Side taxi driver she accused of faking his own death to avoid paying her alimony—had been the one to tell the FBI she’d shown up in the mid-1960s with a newborn baby. Taylor got this wrong: Walker wouldn’t talk to the FBI until 1976, a year after Bliss and Griffin wrote their piece. In his statement to federal agents, he’d say that his ex-wife had actually brought home two children he’d never seen before, one white and one black, and he “never knew where the two babies came from.”
Other than that Daily News article and a short item in the Defender, the Tribune’s Taylor-Fronczak scoop got strangely little follow-up. It wasn’t just the Tribune’s competitors that ignored the report: The paper itself published just one more piece on the convergence of the two scandals before dropping the story for two years. The Tribune finally picked it back up the day after Taylor was sentenced to three to seven years in state prison for welfare fraud and perjury.
On May 13, 1977, court reporter Charles Mount wrote that a man named Samuel Harper was “certain” that Taylor had stolen the Fronczak baby. Harper told law enforcement officials, among them Jack Sherwin, that he’d lived with her in the 1960s, and that “several children and infants, all white, were staying with the woman.” The Tribune reported that “Harper said he is sure Taylor was the kidnaper because she left that day dressed in a white uniform, and the description of the kidnaper…matched Taylor.” The newspaper added that, according to Harper, Linda Taylor had even “filed a police report after the kidnaping, saying she had seen the kidnaper with the baby.”
Mount reported that Sherwin had “no reason to doubt” that Harper was telling the truth. The FBI, however, was less convinced that Linda Taylor had taken the Fronczak baby. Ron Cooper, an agent who worked on the case in the 1970s, would acknowledge decades later that the bureau had looked at Taylor as a suspect, but he’d claim that investigative avenue had turned out to be a cul-de-sac. The FBI “had no cooperation from people around her,” Cooper would say, adding that everyone in her orbit “would tell you a story and it would just sort of be a flimflam thing, and it wouldn’t make any sense.”
No one has ever been charged with carrying out the Fronczak kidnapping. It’s unclear if the FBI eventually exonerated Taylor or if the agency just moved on. T
he bureau has declined to make its case file available for public viewing—releasing those records, the FBI has said, would interfere with its purportedly still-active investigation into the 1964 abduction.
Some of the evidence in the Tribune’s Taylor-Fronczak stories can’t be easily dismissed. There’s no doubt Samuel Harper, who died in 1990, had a relationship with Taylor at around the time of the kidnapping. Taylor’s son Johnnie confirmed that Harper lived with his mother for a time, and Harper was identified as a potential witness in the Wakefield heirship hearing, though he was never called to testify. With regards to the white uniform, a witness in Taylor’s 1976 burglary case provided a written statement indicating that he’d known Taylor to dress as a nurse in the 1960s. Both Johnnie and Lorraine Termini’s sister—the aunt of the girl Johnnie retrieved from his mother’s apartment in 1967—said that Taylor would tell people that she was a nurse and would dress in a nurse’s outfit. Taylor’s daughter, Sandra, would go further, saying her mother worked “at the county hospital as a registered nurse for at least three years.” And when Sherwin filled out his police report after arresting Taylor in August 1974, the detective described her as an unemployed nurse.
There are also good reasons to doubt that Taylor absconded with Paul Joseph Fronczak. In the spring of 1964, she was preoccupied with her quest to take control of Lawrence Wakefield’s estate, a task that required manufacturing documents, coaching witnesses, and establishing herself in the public eye as Constance Wakefield, the rightful inheritor of the policy king’s substantial fortune. The Chicago Defender ran a front-page interview with the self-proclaimed Mrs. Wakefield nine days before the kidnapping, and both the Defender and the Sun-Times published photographs of the ersatz heir. The woman seen in those photos didn’t bear much of a resemblance to sketches of the kidnapper. And although she could’ve theoretically disguised her face, Taylor, whom police typically listed as five foot one, wasn’t a match for the suspect height-wise. After initially saying the kidnapper was five foot six or five foot seven, the police eventually revised that estimate to five foot four.
Samuel Harper’s 1977 accusation didn’t reignite media interest in the Fronczak case. After the Tribune aired his claim that Taylor had stolen the infant, the local and national press essentially forgot about the kidnapping for thirty-five years.
The story reemerged in 2012, when the toddler the Fronczaks had brought home from New Jersey in 1966 began to investigate his pedigree. The adopted Paul Joseph Fronczak, who by then was approaching fifty years old, bought three genetic test kits from a pharmacy, filling one with a vial of his saliva and the other two with DNA samples from his adoptive parents. Two weeks after mailing them in, he got the results: “There is no remote possibility that you are the son of Dora and Chester Fronczak.”
A half century after the kidnapping at Michael Reese Hospital, the whereabouts of the Fronczaks’ biological child remain a mystery. In a series of interviews in 2013 and 2014, Johnnie Harbaugh said he believed his mother had stolen the day-old Paul Joseph from Michael Reese Hospital. He said she’d obtained a new baby at around the time of the kidnapping, a white infant she called Tiger. While she insisted the boy was her own, Johnnie knew she hadn’t been pregnant. He said his mother “was capable of anything,” and he apologized to the Fronczak family for not telling the police what he knew back in the 1960s.
Johnnie may be right that Linda Taylor kidnapped Dora and Chester Fronczak’s son. But Tiger wasn’t Paul Joseph Fronczak. He was a different child, one Taylor almost certainly abducted.
* * *
On the first day of Constance Wakefield’s heirship hearing in November 1964, the petitioner said she’d recently had a baby, “a little boy.” That child, she told the court, had been born on March 3, 1963. Although she was thirty-seven in 1963, the newborn’s certificate of live birth—signed by her go-to disreputable physician, Dr. Grant Sill—identified her as a twenty-six-year-old named Beverly Stineberg. The boy’s father, the birth record said, was a man named J. C.
There’s no record indicating that J. C. and Beverly Stineberg were ever married. Even so, he may have been the “ex-husband” the Tribune wrote about in 1975—the man who told the FBI she’d brought home a baby in the mid-1960s despite not having been pregnant. That child, according to the woman J. C. later married, was known as Tiger.
J. C. was sterile, and thus knew he couldn’t be the boy’s father. Tiger also couldn’t be the Fronczaks’ son, given that his birth certificate had been filed with the State of Illinois a year before Paul Joseph was born. J. C., who died in the early 2000s, had no idea who the baby’s parents really were. He just knew Tiger didn’t belong where he was.
Johnnie was used to seeing kids come and go, including a young black girl who’d stayed with the family for just a few months. He watched his mother and J. C., who lived together in the first half of the 1960s, take care of Tiger for as long as a year. And then, just as suddenly as he’d arrived, Johnnie’s baby brother was gone, and so was J. C. When Johnnie asked his mother what had become of them, all she’d say was that her live-in boyfriend “went home.”
Johnnie thought J. C. and his mother had teamed up to sell Tiger. Years later, J. C.’s wife heard a different story.
Although her husband didn’t like to talk about the past, she knew he’d helped raise Tiger. She also believed he’d severed his relationship with Beverly Stineberg before he took the boy. Her in-laws told her that J. C. and another man had retrieved Tiger from his ex-girlfriend’s apartment. When they’d opened the door, they’d found a bunch of children—she didn’t know how many—living in filth. There had been a pot of chicken on the stove with maggots crawling all over it. The oldest boy had stolen candy bars so the kids would have something to eat.
J. C. had grabbed Tiger, just as Johnnie would take Ana Maria. Rather than keep the child himself, he’d given Tiger to his brother and sister-in-law. J. C.’s relatives had eventually adopted Tiger and given him a new name. So far as J. C.’s wife knew, no money had changed hands. She believed her husband had rescued Tiger, and that it had been an act of love. She never heard what happened to the other children in that apartment, the ones J. C. had left behind.
* * *
Why did Linda Taylor take other people’s children? It’s possible she sold these boys and girls for cash—there was a known black market for child adoption in Chicago, and Johnnie speculated to Jack Sherwin that she’d been part of it. She may have used these children’s names to pad her welfare applications. It’s also plausible, maybe even likely, that her child snatching wasn’t part of any grand scheme—that it was pathological behavior that served no larger purpose.
What’s clear is that Taylor abused babies, young children, and adolescents in different states across multiple decades. Several of her young victims were glimpsed only in passing, seen by those who recognized their plight but didn’t know who they were, and couldn’t or didn’t help them escape. Others, like the white eight-year-old and black four-month-old the Chicago police found unattended in Taylor’s apartment in 1967, were identified at the time but have since had their names redacted from public records. Some of the kids she harmed were her own biological children.
Martha Louise White grew up knowing she’d never be the daughter her mother wanted her to be. When she became a mother herself, she did to her five children what had been done to her, making them feel uncared for and abandoning them. The oldest, Clifford, was mostly raised by the Elliott family in Missouri; he left his mother for good when he was about fourteen. Taylor neglected Paul and Johnnie when they were infants and deserted them as they approached adolescence. Paul was twelve when he became a ward of the state. Johnnie, like Clifford, was fourteen when he left home. Sandra, too, was fourteen when she ran away to Glencoe, and she went to Arkansas to live with Clifford two years after that. Taylor’s youngest child, Robin, was sixteen when, shortly before his mother’s arrest in Michigan in 1972, he said he was setting out for Florida to determine his real name.
All of Taylor’s children felt compelled to get away from her. Not all of them stayed away. When Sandra returned from Arkansas in the late 1960s, she and her mother fell back into old patterns. Four months after Sandra’s eighteenth birthday, and a decade after the explosion at Webster School in Peoria, Taylor told a team of Veterans Administration doctors that the teenager was deaf in both ears, had a burn across her abdomen, was hampered by a heart condition that made it impossible for her to exercise, and had been diagnosed with mental impairments. “The mother states that she wouldn’t trust her daughter with making a purchase over $5.00 because she doesn’t always come back with the right change and some people take advantage of her,” a neuropsychiatrist noted on December 10, 1969. “Mother states that the doctors at Walter Reed Hospital told her that the patient was mentally retarded and that it was the result of the fire and explosion she was involved in.”
Sandra seemed less certain about what she was suffering from, or whether she was suffering at all. “I have no complaints,” she told the doctor, then added, “I do have trouble hearing especially when I go to a party and the music is playing loud.” Later, she admitted to being depressed and crying frequently. “I don’t know what my troubles are,” she said, “but I am not crazy.” The neuropsychiatrist concluded that Sandra had a “mental age of 10 years.” A VA physician cut his examination short after Sandra became “agitated” but nevertheless reported that she had compensated congestive heart failure.
